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UK Investigatory Powers Bill

UK Investigatory Powers Bill

Britain's Investigatory Powers Bill (IPB) was introduced in draft form in November 2015. Its 245 pages contained the UK government's plans to create a statutory basis for the country's mass surveillance, data retention,and remote intrusion practices. The bill follows a series of successfulchallenges to the UK's previous legal frameworks, and growing knowledge and concern about the unchecked practices of the General Communications Headquarters (GCHQ), the UK's signals intelligence service.

Instead of restraining the growing intrusion into private life of the UK's state surveillance institutions, the proposed bill sought to legitimise it, establishing new wide-ranging state powers to spy on innocent persons, and to compel private companies and individuals to comply in secret with UK government orders.

EFF has been working with Don't Spy on Us, a coalition of British and international non-profits working to defeat the IPB's proposed powers. We've chosen to concentrate on the bill's Equipment Interference (EI) provisions. Equipment interference is the GCHQ term for government hacking: breaking into private computing devices in order to spy directly on their users, or to secretly collect communications data being transported via those machines. The Investigatory Powers Bill, one of the first laws to explicitly permit such techniques for law enforcement and intelligence work, contains very little in the way of oversight, and grants the British government an almost blank check for deploying malware against individual users as well as the heart of the Internet's infrastructure. It also demands that private companies and individuals assist in the deployment of this spyware, no matter where they operate in the world, and requires that this assistance be kept permanently secret from customers, partners, and the general public.

With indecent speed, and after the barest nod to debate, the Australian Parliament has now passed the Assistance and Access Act, unopposed and unamended. The bill is a cousin to the United Kingdom’s Investigatory Powers Act, passed in 2016. The two laws vary in their details, but both now...

On September 13, after a five-year legal battle, the European Court of Human Rights said that the UK government’s surveillance regime—which includes the country’s mass surveillance programs, methods, laws, and judges—violated the human rights to privacy and to freedom of expression. The court’s opinion is the culmination of lawsuits...

In the last few years, we’ve discovered just how much trust — whether we like it or not — we have all been obliged to place in modern technology. Third-party software, of unknown composition and security, runs on everything around us: from the phones we carry around, to the smart...

This week, the political heads of the intelligence services of Canada, New Zealand, Australia, the United Kingdom, and the United States (the "Five Eyes" alliance) met in Ottawa. The Australian delegation entered the meeting saying publicly that they intended to "thwart the encryption of terrorist messaging." The final communiqué...

This year was one of the busiest in recent memory when it comes to cryptography law in the United States and around the world. But for all the Sturm und Drang, surprisingly little actually changed in the U.S. In this post, we’ll run down the list of things that happened...